Analysis Of Chinese Folk Songs, With The Motive Of Analytical Methods

With the compiling of The Collections of Chinese Folk Songs, studies in this field come into a new stage. However, judging from some authoritative academic works, this research focuses more on modality, tonality, rhythm, form (phrase structure), singing style, system, school, harmony, than on "motivic analysis", one of the methodologies in music analysis.This thesis, with the dimension of composing techniques in music analysis as the starting point, tackles the motives of Chinese folk songs in details, including the examples from all its 56 nationalities. The writer aims at finding the relationship between Chinese folk songs' materials, at observing the relations between different variants, as well as between motives and their variants, at understanding the ways Chinese folk songs organize and vary, and at representing the unity of their creators' logical mental structures and music's structures.The first part deals with related theories concerning Chinese folk song, such as its concept, the outline of its studies, its relations with other genres of Chinese folk music, its characteristics, the method of motif analysis, the concept of motif and its application, motif as applied in the pitch and rhythm of Chinese folk song. The second part, following a short introduction concerning selection of examples and perspectives for analysis, and letters as identifiers, presents an analysis of examples - sometimes by means of graphical expression - from such perspectives as pitch motif and its variants (transposed or original), rhythm motif and its variants (complete or incomplete repetition), motif combining pitch and rhythm, motif model of this sort, and motif and cell model and its variant.In the process of motif analysis of Chinese folk songs, some problems have been put forward and the answers have been found out, both unconsciously. All these problems could be summed up as "universality", including those in Eastern and Western music creation, and those combined in art music and folk music creation. Universality indicates itself in every details of the whole analysis, and embodies itself in the organization of musical materials, in the selection of analytical perspectives, in the application of creative techniques and of the methods for analysis, and even in the methods themselves.The writer hopes for the attention to the analytical area concerning creative techniques this thesis attempts at, and for a re-examination of universal characters as reflected in human music creation as well, which might be a little contribution to the studies of Chinese folk songs.